I added my name to Amendments 57BB, 60 and 62 and will speak briefly to those, but I start by congratulating the noble Earl on bringing forward his Amendment 57B and for overseeing a significant change in government policy on the subject of standard packaging. Like many of your Lordships, I was heartened when I heard the then Public Health Minister, Anna Soubry, around a year ago saying that the Government were minded to go down the standard packs route and then bitterly disappointed last summer when the plans were suddenly dropped. Various conspiracy theories were propounded at the time and I will not go into those now, but it looked as if the issue was dead, at least for the foreseeable future.
At that point, it seemed sensible to look at whether there was any possibility of adding a standard packaging amendment to another Bill, which might not immediately present itself as the most appropriate, in order to be able to give the House the opportunity to debate the issue and come to a view on it. With the help of staff in the Public Bill Office—about whom I cannot speak highly enough, as their help was invaluable in framing our original amendment in Committee and the subsequent amendment that we tabled for today—we were able to bring the issue to the Committee and approach the issue in an entirely cross-party and non-party way. The amendment that we put together was signed by the noble Baronesses, Lady Finlay and Lady Tyler, the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and myself.
Amendment 60 is an improved version of what we had in Committee, but the Government’s amendment today is a great improvement on that as well. I congratulate them on picking up a number of the points that were defective in ours and coming forward with one that, I think, is very effective. Tobacco control should not be a party-political matter; it should be the common concern of everyone who cares about the health and the well-being of the public. As we have heard from the Minister, smoking-related disease still kills more than 100,000 people across the UK and is by far the most common form of preventable death—it accounts for more premature deaths than the next six most common causes put together.
As most smokers start as teenagers, the teenage market is the one which the tobacco companies are anxious to promote, which it is the responsibility of all
of us to try to prevent. Two-thirds of existing smokers report that they started before their 18th birthday, and around two in five before they were 16. The younger the age at which they start, the greater the harm is likely to be, because the early uptake of the habit is associated with subsequent heavier smoking—of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, experienced with his mother and her 60-a-day habit—high levels of dependency, a lower chance of quitting and a higher chance of death from smoking-related disease.
For the tobacco industry to keep its market, it is necessary for it to recruit new smokers every year. That is because older smokers die or quit—or indeed lose their lives prematurely as a result of their habit. Since most smokers start when they are young, it follows that, for the industry, young people are the most important target group of potential new consumers.
We know what the tobacco industry would do in this country to promote its products if the law and the authorities allowed. Indeed, we probably know more about the commercial strategies of the tobacco industry than about any other major industry in the world, in large part because so many previously confidential documents were made public as a result of the US master settlement agreement with the industry in 1998.
Given the restrictive legislation around marketing and advertising tobacco in the UK, the industry is left with few options to promote its products. Of these, the most important is now packaging. Packs can be used to market and advertise, to create brand identities and to help present an image of smoking that may indeed seem “cool” to a curious teenager. There are many diversionary arguments advanced by the tobacco industry and the front groups it funds so lavishly about why we should not proceed with standardised packaging. So we hear tobacco industry claims that the UK is being flooded with illicit tobacco and that standard packs will make the problem worse. But the level of illicit trade has fallen sharply since it peaked back in 2000, and the security features on existing packs will also be present on standard ones. Both our amendment and the Government’s would allow the Secretary of State to specify packaging requirements that would enhance and not reduce product security, and make smuggling and counterfeiting more difficult.
However, the tobacco industry’s real, core argument is quite simple. It is advancing the proposition that its claimed so-called “intellectual property rights” trump the requirements of public health—or to put it more sharply, that its right to design products designed to get children addicted is more important than the children’s right to be protected from that addiction and the health damage that it causes. I believe that the overwhelming majority of your Lordships, and indeed Members of the other place, reject the tobacco industry’s arguments and want to make cigarettes as unattractive to children and young people as possible. So, as I said at the beginning, I warmly welcome the Government’s amendment. I congratulate the Minister on bringing it forward and on his announcement regarding proxy purchasing of tobacco products by adults for young people, and the regulation of e-cigarettes, about which we shall hear more at Third Reading.
I am not going to speak about smoking in cars because the speeches on that subject by the noble Lord, Lord Ribeiro—with whom I agree, and whom I congratulate on his perseverance in taking a Private Member’s Bill through your Lordships’ House on this subject—and the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, have covered the main points. However, I strongly commend the points that my noble friend Lord Hunt made about the desirability of moving towards a smoke-free atmosphere in cars where children are trapped and subject to appalling levels of second-hand smoke.
I am very happy indeed to support the government amendment. We shall not be pressing our own amendment on standard packaging, but I shall be supporting my noble friend.